Learning to Learn in an Era of Surprise? Intelligence Production and Use in Foreign Policy-Making in Britain, Germany and the European Union

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TThe proposed project addresses salient concerns about alleged failures of anticipation, preparedness and response in national and European foreign policy against a backdrop of three 'strategic surprises': the Arab Spring, the Russian annexation of the Crimea (Bildt, 2013), and the rapid rise of the so-called Islamic State/D'aesh. Strategy documents identify rising levels of uncertainty and proclaim '[w]e live in a world of predictable unpredictability. We will therefore equip ourselves to respond more rapidly and flexibly to the unknown lying ahead' (EGS, 2016: 46). In response to these surprises and alleged failures, different public bodies have conducted performance reviews relating to the Arab Spring (2012), the EU's approach to Russia (House of Lords 2015), the 2003 invasion of Iraq (Committee of Privy Counsellors, 2016) and the confluence of different crises (German Foreign Office, 2014). Lessons identified from these episodes are likely to shape future foreign policy for years to come, just as lessons from the 1930s shaped the thinking of a generation of US and European policy-makers, for good or for worse (Lebow, 1985). Yet, the few existing public inquiries differ substantially in their depth and scope, the criteria for judging success and failure, and how they handle problems such as hindsight bias. Moreover, not only do practitioners disagree about what is knowable and should be learnt, but public and mediatised debates follow their own logic in constructing failures (Oppermann & Spencer, 2016). The existing academic literature in the field of International Relations does not offer much help in addressing these questions either: It rarely defines what it considers successful learning, nor does it specify under what conditions such learning takes place in foreign policy decision-making. Part of the problem is the lack of engagement with competing conceptions of learning and intelligence in the broader field of International Relations (Levy, 1994) and evidence-based public policy in political science (Sanderson, 2002). Moreover, insights gleaned from US case studies may not be applicable in an organisationally and politically more diverse European setting. European countries may be affected by these old and new threats in different and more direct ways than the United States given Europe's close geopolitical proximity and distinct socio-cultural make-up.Against this background the project aims to provide a better normative and evidential basis for learning the right lessons about warning and current intelligence in relation to these different kinds of threats. In a first step the project team will engage with the relevant literature as well as leading practitioners to arrive at a normatively grounded yet realistic expectations of good learning in foreign policy looks. This will form the basis for the empirical work which is based on a most likely research design. We focus on three of the most capable actors in European foreign policy with the UK, Germany and the EU, each with their distinct yet interconnected intelligence and foreign policy communities. The project team will look at how these actors have handled three cases of major strategic surprises by combining desk-based research and practitioner interviews to ascertain the actual dynamics of threat emergence and escalation with the knowledge claims over time and given substantial uncertainty. Thirdly, the project team will then draw mainly on interview data and comparisons between the actors to study performance and underlying causes of relative success and failure. In a final step, we will engage with practitioners on the Advisory Board and in a series of workshop to elucidate key lessons to be learnt from each of these cases and how to improve actors' capacities to better anticipate and react to new threats.